Eduardo Saverin is one of the co-founders of Facebook along with Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz and Andrew McCollum. He is a Brazilian Internet Entrepreneur and an active angel investor. He was a hot topic in media when he renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2009. It was alleged he renounced U.S. citizenship to avoid capital gains taxes. He currently lives in Singapore, where he moved in 2009. In 2015, he co-founded the ‘B Capital Group’ Other than Facebook, his major investments include B Capital Group, Ninja Van, Aporta, Lyft, Qwiki, Jumio and others. According to Forbes, Eduardo Saverin had a net worth of $7.2 billion as of 2015. In 2015, he owned around 53 million Facebook shares. In 2010, he, along with Mexican entrepreneur Aldo Alvarez, co-founded Aporta, an online portal for charity. 'The Social Network', a film based on Facebook, shows his role in creation of Facebook and his relationship with Mark Zuckerberg.

Eduardo Saverin was born Eduardo Luiz Saverin in a Jewish family in Sao Paulo, Brazil on March 19, 1982.He had two other siblings. His father, Robert Saverin, was a successful industrialist who worked in clothing, shipping and real estate. Eduardo’s mother was a psychologist.

Eduardo is known for his entrepreneurial skills which can be traced back into his family. His Romanian born grandfather, Eugenio Saverin, founded the popular kids wear chain retail stores, Tip Top.

In his early childhood, his family moved to Rio de Janeiro and then finally settled in Miami, Florida in 1993.

Eduardo completed his primary education from the Gulliver Preparatory School, Miami. Later, he undertook his undergraduate degree in one of the Ivy League Colleges in Harvard. He was a member of the Phoenix S. K. Club and presided over Harvard Investment Association.

He is also an active member of the Alpha Epsilon Pi Fraternity, which was established to develop leadership for the Jewish community.

It is believed that he made around $300,000 while he was just an undergrad due to the lax in Brazil’s insider trading regulations.

He graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in Economics with great distinction in the year 2006.

His life changed when he first met Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard and decided to help him with thefacebook.com.

Eduardo met Mark in his junior year at Harvard. Mark had an idea for a social networking site cum online directory for Harvard students, but needed financial support to develop it.

Seeing that Mark had a brilliant idea that was worth investing in, Eduardo agreed to support him. Mark never saw thefacebook.com as a way to create money. In fact, Mark’s only intention was to create an innovative website that could connect people. However, his approach was unknown to Eduardo and he had the vision to make money through this website. Thus, he decided to fund Mark’s business and joined him as a co-founder funding all his servers and other necessities.

After successfully launching Facebook at Harvard, the co-founders decided to expand it beyond its limitations. Thus, they decided to move to Palo Alto, California. However, Saverin went to New York to undertake an internship at the Lehman brothers in 2004.

Saverin was supposed to work on getting funds, setting up a company, and making a business model during the course of his internship. Saverin, thus, became Facebook’s first Chief Finance Officer.

However, Saverin was found to have run unauthorized ads on Facebook, without the knowledge of Mark Zuckerberg. He even developed the Joboozle, which was a job board site.

This led to a severe conflict between Zuckerberg and Saverin and when Eduardo failed to provide Facebook with the required funding, Mark had to find other investors.

Sean Parker took Eduardo’s place for finding funds for Facebook. Peter Thiel, another investor who came in contact with Mark through Sean, helped Mark in cutting off Eduardo.

Continue Reading Below

To cut Saverin off, Zuckerberg formed a new company named Facebook, a Delaware corporation, and then distributed its new shares to everyone other than Saverin.

Eduardo had to sign an agreement that made Mark the sole director of Facebook.

The conflict led to Facebook cutting him off its co-founders list. However, later, after Eduardo approached the media, Facebook retained Eduardo as a co-founder in their list alongside Mark, Dustin Moskovitz, and two others. An out of court agreement between Eduardo and Facebook prevented Eduardo to let anything out about Facebook in the media.

In 2010, Eduardo, along with Aldo Alvarez, a Mexican reporter, co-founded Aporta. It is an online portal for charity.

In 2016, he closed deals of over $140 million in Asia, which included the ones for the startup Ninja Van.

Eduardo Saverin is married to Elaine Andriejanssen, a girl from a business oriented family, owning several businesses in Massachusetts. She is Chinese Indonesian. They got engaged on 27th March 2014, and tied the knot on June 25tj, 2015 at the French Riviera.

Eduardo lives in his multi-million dollar condo in Singapore. He is always connected with the world using his iPhone, iPad and three MacBooks.

He has a thing for weather forecast and one of his three Macs keep on running weather softwares. His hobby for weather forecast about tsunamis and Hurricanes deepened when the hurricane Andrew hit South Florida in 1992.

Saverin found the media’s eye as a 13-year old, when he beat a chess grandmaster in a match in Orlando.

Eduardo is a shy and yet a very strong willed man. His business mind is what makes him special.

Continue Reading Below

He renounced his US citizenship in 2009. It is believed that he did it to evade the heavy taxes that were lodged onto him after huge gains from Facebook investments. However, he claims that he always wanted to stay in Singapore and that he can pay only as much taxes to the US government as much as he owes to them.

Even after the controversial removal of Eduardo from Facebook, he still believes in Mark and admires him. He states that Mark has always been a visionary and since day one he was committed to Facebook more than anybody else.

Eduardo likes to keep a low profile on social networking sites.

When asked about the movie, The Social Network, he states that it is a Hollywood fantasy and that the movie is exaggerated.